Personal Chair: Jamie Pearce

Professor Jamie Pearce has been appointed a Personal Chair in Health Geography.

Jamie Pearce is a human geographer with an undergraduate degree from Durham University and postgraduate degrees from the universities of Leicester and St Andrews.

Jamie joined the University of Edinburgh as Reader in Human Geography in early 2009.

Between 2003 and 2009 he was Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

While in New Zealand he became the founding Director of the GeoHealth Laboratory.

Jamie’s research is concerned with social justice and health, and seeks to understand various social, political and physical mechanisms operating at a range of geographical scales that establish and perpetuate spatial inequalities in health.

Working at the intersection of human geography, public health and epidemiology, Jamie has particular interests in health-related behaviours, environmental justice and health, and macro-level health-related processes.

Among his recent publications is Geographies of Obesity: Environmental Understandings of the Obesity Epidemic (published by Ashgate in 2010), which he co-edited with Karen Witten.

With colleagues in Edinburgh and Glasgow he has recently founded the Centre for Research on the Environment, Society and Health.